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George Pell's heavy-handed comments ignore the pain of abuse victims
By Steve Dow
Cardinal George Pell's deep bass tone has taken an ugly, threatening turn. His thinly veiled threat to sool the lawyers on Peter Saunders for the abuse survivor's 60 Minutes interview shows a Catholic Church deeply disconnected from public opinion that demands free speech be heard and children be protected.
Saunders, founder of a British charity for abuse victims and handpicked by Pope Francis to sit on the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, told the Channel Nine program that Pell was a "massive thorn" to the papacy and should be moved aside: "He has a catalogue of denigrating people, of acting with callousness, cold-heartedness, almost sociopathic I would go as far as to say, this lack of care." This internecine Vatican volley of words may well be defamatory, but how pathetic that the cardinal cannot see beyond his own bruised ego. Pell's spokesman fired back that Saunders has never met Pell, the former Melbourne and Sydney archbishop: "The false and misleading claims made against his eminence are outrageous … there is no excuse for broadcasting incorrect and prejudicial material." His imperious "eminence" should drop the lawyerly threats, then put all his thinking into planning for the appearance he finally last week promised, to return home and make if requested by the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. We need to know what he has to say, for instance, about the allegations of abuse in Ballarat, and whether he was complicit in moving Australia's worst paedophile priest, Gerald Ridsdale, to another parish. Here's my tip: when he finally does appear before the royal commission, he will obfuscate and protect his and the church's own naked self-interest. Way back in late 2002, I sat down with Pell in his office near Sydney's St Mary's Cathedral. He was by this time Archbishop of Sydney, having moved up from Melbourne. Pell had just returned from stepping aside for two months while an independent inquiry conducted by retired Victorian Supreme Court judge Eric Southwell examined an allegation that Pell had committed sexual abuse against a complainant at a church camp at Victoria's Phillip Island in 1961 or 1962. Southwell dismissed the complaint, saying he was "not satisfied" that it had been established. But Southwell also dismissed claims at the inquiry that Pell's accuser, who was 12 at the time of the alleged attacks, may have been seeking compensation, and noted Pell's counsel had subjected the complainant to a "forceful attack". Plus ça change. Pell told me he would pray for his accuser, but then claimed the accuser was motivated by "three alternatives": these were either "a delusion, or a violation by somebody else, or lies, or a combination of all three …" Pell clearly was not in touch with his accuser's pain. Pell admitted in 2002 that the Catholic Church's community standing had been battered by sexual abuse allegations in general. "There's no doubt about it, there's been too much of this that is shameful for the church, that has damaged our credibility," he told me. Then, extraordinarily, referring to the church's compensation process that he set up for sexual abuse in Victoria while Archbishop of Melbourne in 1996, he claimed: "But I also believe that while the processes were never terribly bad, they were spotty and indifferent and for the last six years or so we've been substantially faithful to the protocols … right across Australia." Cardinal Pell's heavy-handed lawyerly handling of the Saunders interview is true to form and will only further undermine the church's credibility. On the social policy front, perhaps Pell should contemplate why Ireland swung so convincingly towards the same-sex marriage he so bitterly opposes: because the Catholic Church has lost so much of its moral authority when dealing with its critics, its abuse and its own bullshit.
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